Same-sex vows cause no harm to our families

Our view: The reasons given for Proposition 8 just don't stand up to scrutiny.

In one of the most famous American defenses of religious freedom, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "[I]t does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

We must say the same thing about same-sex marriage.

Proposition 8 would reverse the state Supreme Court's May ruling in favor of same-sex marriage and write "one man, one woman" into the California constitution. Its backers say it's needed to "protect marriage." From what?

In the three months after gay and lesbian couples won the right to marry, about 11,000 such weddings took place. Has any traditional couple's marriage been hurt by the wave of ceremonies? Have their vows to love, honor and cherish been revoked?

The family is the foundation of civilization. Traditionalists who see the family threatened from every direction understandably balk at what they perceive as one more attack.

But compared with drugs and alcohol, materialism and greed, sex-soaked electronic media, a society that treats commitment as optional, and the human failures of selfishness and cruelty, it's hard to see what harm gay weddings do to marriage.

Proponents of limiting marriage to its traditional form argue that children are best off when raised by a mother and a father. That has no bearing on Proposition 8. Gay couples have been adopting children in California for more than 20 years.

Ads promoting Proposition 8 argue that if the measure fails people could be sued for their religious beliefs and churches could lose their tax-exempt status. These are hollow scare tactics.

In other countries, including Canada, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2005, churches and pastors have faced government sanction for preaching against homosexuality. But we have the First Amendment in this country; religious beliefs and expression enjoy the strictest legal protections. That won't change.

And churches do not have to sanctify same-sex marriages, just as they refrain from blessing any wedding that doesn't match their tenets. The state grants same-sex couples civil marriage — and along with it the right to easily inherit property, enjoy hassle-free hospital visits and file joint state tax returns. Questions of faith remain, rightly, a matter for pastors and parishioners.

Over the past few decades, society has grown far more accepting of gays and lesbians — to the point where the once scarcely conceivable idea of gay marriage is, at least for now, the law of the land in California. The question on the November ballot is whether to take that right away.

We just can't see how those couples are picking anyone's pocket or breaking anyone's leg. And that makes the right vote on Proposition 8 a "No."